There is a war being fought for the turf controlled by the big tech social media oligopolies, and when the openness of these forums is lost, we’re back to the equivalent of Samizdat.

…The new censorship is welcomed in big tech as it is on campus. Because the leftist censors get to define the terms.

As I blogged when discussing YouTube’s latest round of climate change fact checking:

Even Slate is concerned about unelected entities regulating speech. “Whatever they do with conspiracy theorists, placing the distribution of information in the hands of a few tech companies will remain a very big problem,” writes Isaac Chotiner.

We’re effectively dealing with a free speech crisis wherein the enemy is not (amazingly) the government, but tech behemoths who’ve created the realm where the majority of speech, discussion, and thought is placed and now get to make the rules concerning what thought is allowed and what is too offensive for the public arena. There is no recourse, no appeal process, no justice system, just the court of public opinion.

It’s downright terrifying.

Every one watching objectively knew that Alex Jones was just a test case. Unfortunately, that prediction appears to be playing out.

Comments

I agree with big tech’s right to purge conservatives as much as conservatives have the right to not decorate cakes for gay weddings.

The problem is, big tech WILL NEVER OWN THEIR HATE. They want to hide behind a firewall and pretend they are not the losers in the market place of free speech. They can’t discuss their bigotry in the light of day, because it cannot be defended in a room full of adults.

The so-called “bitching” of the right about shadow banning and lock downs should be put front and center. If tech wants to do this- let them do it with full disclosure and declare their platforms a left leaning echo chamber.

FB and others won’t because the invisible hand would respond in kind. This is a culture war, if not the epicenter of a full blown cultural revolution. The jacobians will find their intended victims much more prickly and hard to eradicate in this redux.

Any commitment to free speech those sites have is nice but not sufficient. MasterCard telling Patreon to cut off Jihad Watch or else is the test case for this dystopia. What’s next is MasterCard telling Gab and Bitchute to cancel an account or else they won’t process payments to or from those companies, nor will they allow payment portals like Stripe and Patreon to process such payments, even if they’re Visa or Discover.

A few years ago when Google and the other big tech companies smothered the RSS protocol in the crib, I kinda wondered “why” but didn’t really think too much about it.

Now as they move towards aggressively into censorship it becomes clear why they killed RSS… it was a decentralized mechanism for distributing content to interested parties. Individual web sites can publish their content however they want (blog, web site, etc) and then individual users can subscribe to the content from the publishers they’re interested in. No big tech company in the middle “curating” or censoring content.

One initial step that every conservative web publisher should take is to re-establish an RSS feed on their site. And EVERY conservative user should start using an RSS reader again, and quit using Facebook, etc.

PragerU is more than capable of buying or renting their own servers, hosting their videos there, and publishing them regularly to people who want to see them, whether it be by RSS, email blast, or their own app.

That would, however, cost money and require people who understand how the Internet works.

All this tantrum-throwing by the right is the equivalent of bitching that the local newspaper won’t print your op-ed, or that the local billboard owner won’t let you put your ads up there for free.

Is it a problem that content aggregators like Facebook, Google and Apple are exercising their right to freedom of association in a way conservatives don’t like? Well, yes, arguably: a moral one. But not a legal one. Conservative propaganda outlets need to stop whining that a private company won’t give them free hosting and bandwidth and start living their principles.

And RSS isn’t any deader than HTTP is. It’s ubiquitous. Every news site/blog/whatever I read has one and my home page is an RSS aggregator portal. It’s how I read this blog, and a dozen other conservative/libertarian ones besides.

Before constitutional protection was granted on the basis of race, and gender the discrimination of those characteristics was also just a moral quandary and not a legal one. I guess people back then were just exercising their right of freedom of association?

Just because political viewpoints can be discriminated against now legally, doesn’t mean that it should stay this way. It certainly wasn’t the case for race and gender.

You almost entirely miss the point. Perhaps that’s the partisan fervor? The clandestine and surreptitious nature of the acts is the issue. The near lying and unbelievable words from the companies contradicts what is happening. Given the monopoly mindset and behavior of the platforms, true civil libertarians should be concerned. Few argue it’s not allowed. Most simply want to highlight the corrosive imbalance. And the deceit too, perhaps.

How expensive is doing your own RSS aggregator portal? I use Feed Wrangler as my aggregator and ReadKit to view the feeds. It’s not terribly expensive, and Feed Wrangler hasn’t, so far as I can tell, taken any action to censor or shadow-ban sites it aggregates, but having a reasonably priced solution available if they do would be nice.

There are certainly options out there. But the easy-to-use options still house your preferences on a server somewhere, quite possibly under the watchful eye of a SJW who wouldn’t think twice about doxxing you.

There are a couple of good open-source projects where you can host your own setup, but that’s not a viable option for the non-geeks.

The big techs have a vested interest in ensuring that no alternative to their hegemony gets big enough for the network effect to kick in.

Says a tech ignoramus named daniel_ream. You don’t own any of the OS , programming languages, etc. that make your computer work. You are buying a license to use them. Those licenses can be revoked at any time.

RSS is not nearly as ubiquitous as it used to be. Many major sites, such as Twitter, ceased supporting it. Major browsers that used to have native support for it no longer do. Google simply killed the most popular reader app a few years ago. The big players are actively trying to kill it because it takes revenue away from them, and doing so increases their stranglehold on the web. What was once a public forum for free speech is increasingly becoming a walled garden, run by progressives, where conservative voices were first shouted down and are now being excluded altogether.

How long do you figure it will be before the big tech companies start to exercise their “right to freedom of association” by banning voices they don’t like from their web services platforms? Then even running your own server will become a major pain.

How long before the prog outrage machine pressures ICANN into denying people with the “wrong” opinions the right to register a domain name?

It’s time to start demanding action from our elected representatives. Start with cancelling government contracts to these firms, since that’s almost immediate. Next up is removing their common carrier protections.

That would almost instantly cause them to collapse, as their stock would tank based on the certainty of massive lawsuits.

How about conservatives moving in mass to service providers other than these companies. Not just video and social, but whole businesses websites. Either create or partner with an ISP to take all the business from these activist businesses. Smart people in business focus solely on business, not on trying to impose their beliefs on others.

I’ve taken that position about entertainment as well as internet reach. If a Tyler Perry can create his own world, studios and everything else, all outside of Hollywood and make billions, why can’t some others put together the same?
The problem with a lot of the social media platforms is the way the companies have essentially crated monopolies, and have the funds to continue that aggression. E.g., although there are many other options to YouTube for video sharing, none will reach people who aren’t already looking there. There really isn’t a Facebook equivalent, yet. Etc.

However, there are a lot of voids that could be filled by enterprising entrepreneurs. And with enough funds those could be built to be popular. But you will have to be able to fight GoogleFacebookTwitter, the blob that has endless cash and attorneys to keep you in court about every aspect of an operation, for starters.

Anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together knew Alex Jones was a test case to see if they could get away with it.

Lawsuits need to fly. They have fully avoided any liability for content because they were given an exception because it was assumed they WERE NOT responsible for moderating content, only carrying it.

If these pieces of shit are going to moderate content then they have exposed themselves to legal liability as a PUBLISHER, because they are CHOOSING and APPROVING of the content that they allow to appear.

HUD today sued Facebook for promoting illegal discrimination in housing. This could be the first legal challenge to how Internet oligarchs target ads. One man’s tailoring ads to audiences is another man’s discrimination.

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